“Soon we’ll be living on basic income and just podcasting at each other all day.”
That prediction, delivered two weeks ago by lawyer and writer Mike Whelan on Twitter, was no doubt tongue-in-cheek. But now, it is also seeming prescient, as a cooped-up community of legal professionals with new-found time on their hands launch ever-more and ever-more-frequent podcasts.
The most telling evidence of this is that, in the space of three weeks, we have gone from zero daily legal podcasts to three daily legal podcasts.
Of this new crop of daily podcasts, Greg Lambert, already a podcaster with his and Marlene Gebauer’s show The Geek in Review, was the first to make the most of his sheltering in place by launching a podcast about — what else — sheltering in place and working from home. Started March 22, Lambert calls it In Seclusion.
Two days later, on March 24, and just a day after he recorded an episode of my LawNext podcast, Jack Newton, cofounder and CEO of practice management company Clio, launched Daily Matters, a podcast (with video) devoted to exploring the new normal for law firms.
Not to be outdone, Laurence Colletti, executive producer of the Legal Talk Network, apparently not content with being holed up in sunny San Diego, launched his own “dailyish” podcast, Legal Talk Today, featuring short episodes covering essential legal issues.
I’m not one to talk, as I recently launched a second podcast, Legaltech Week. But, honestly, I’d been thinking about this before the pandemic hit. Like my other podcast, it is weekly, not daily, and I am trying to keep each episode mercifully short at 15 minutes or less.
And I also should acknowledge that I have blood in the game, so to speak, insofar as my son Ben Ambrogi, the producer of my shows, has now formally launched Populus Radio, a company that is in the business of producing podcasts.
But it does sometimes seem that we are getting to the point where having a podcast is de rigueur.
For instance, when Dan Lear, former director of industry relations for Avvo, announced last week that he was taking a leadership role with epayment company Gravity Legal, the announcement came with the news that he would also launch a podcast related to the role, Financially Legal.
It is difficult to know just how many law-related podcasts there are these days. But here is the irony: Even as sheltering in place gives us all more time to make podcasts, there are indications that people are spending less time listening to them.
I conducted my own Twitter poll on this question. I asked whether sheltering in place had caused to people to listen to more or fewer podcasts. Fifty-six percent said they are listening less, and 22.5 percent said they are listening more.
The company Podtrac, which tracks podcast downloads and audience growth, found that both were down starting from March 9. Podcast downloads decreased 1% the week of March 30-April 5, 4% the week of March 23-29, 2% the week of March 16-22, and 1% during the week of March 9-15, across all its measured podcasts.
Audience also decreased over most of that same period, decreasing 5% the week of March 23-29, 8% the week of March 16-22, and 2% the week of March 9-15. Audience rose by 1% for the week of March 30-April 5.
Worth noting, however, is that even with these recent drops, Podtrac says that podcast downloads have grown by 24% and audience has grown by 9% since the start of the year.
Does this plethora of podcasts mean listeners will lose interest or that the field will be glutted?
This was a question that was also often asked in the early days of blogging, as the number of legal blogs grew from a dozen or two to hundreds and then to thousands.
My answer for podcasts is the same as it was for blogs. If you create content that is of consistently good quality and of interest to your intended audience, the readers or listeners will come.
In fact, in this time of seclusion, podcasts may be more relevant than ever. They connect us not just through words, as on a printed page, but also through the sounds of the voices that speak those words, creating a kind of intimacy that only audio can.
For me, this was most striking during my LawNext interview this week with David Lat, the founder of Above the Law, about his battle with COVID-19 and his 17-day hospitalization. His voice, still hoarse from intubation, conveyed the pain and emotion of his experience in a way his written words never could.
So are we all destined to be podcasters now? Maybe. And maybe it wouldn’t be the worse thing that could happen.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).